‘Aren’t you too old for tantrums?’ he says.
‘Fuck you.’ She frightens herself saying it, not sure how he’ll react, this stranger, and hurries away from him. The sides of the house close in on her. Everything is too small, the roof too low, the stain on the timber too dark. As a child she imagined the wood came from the black forests of fairytales.
Her father is still in the kitchen, talking to Joe. ‘She used to be so clever. Got in with a bad crowd.’
What does he expect from her? It’s unfair of him to tell Joe these things. She needs to get outside, shoves the door open. The night air cools her face. The house traps the heat of all those bodies, drinking and sweating. She stands on the top step, wishing for her drink. A hand on her elbow – Joe. She leans into him, relieved her dad hasn’t frightened him off. He says, ‘How can you see anything out here?’
Lizzie wants to explain her dad’s talent of shrinking her to a little girl. Never grew much anyway, he’s told her more than once. It makes her so angry she can barely think.
‘Want to make a fire?’ Joe asks.
‘Alright.’
He ducks back inside and returns with a gas lamp, shaking a box of matches like castanets. He holds on to the railings, and Lizzie holds on to him. She likes the feel of his arm beneath his jacket. Curls her fingers around the crook of his elbow and tries to ignore the throb between her legs. They take the steps one at a time, the lantern blinding them to everything but the tread in front of them.
She sends him under the house, and he comes out rolling a barrel, barely keeping a hold of the thing. He up-ends the barrel, grabs it as it teeters. He asks her for newspapers, and she goes upstairs to find them. When she’s at the top step he hails her, so she waves the papers above her head in mock triumph. Back down with him, she pulls them apart, wadding up the single sheets and flinging them in the barrel. He throws a match in, and the flame curls around the paper.
Lizzie hears Grace and turns towards her. She’s still with Frank, who’s carrying a fresh supply of rum. Maybe that’s his appeal. They pass the bottle around, stare at the flames. Lizzie can’t keep the thread of conversation. She watches Joe bring the bottle to his mouth, then suck in the air at the top as he pulls it away.
They finish off the rum. Lizzie is caught in the upward swell of drink. Joe and Frank talk boxing, sizing each other up. Frank stands and grabs Joe’s elbow. ‘Show me what you can do.’
They move beyond the fire.
Grace says, ‘Hope Frank wins.’ She might be joking, but Lizzie doesn’t like the edge in her voice. Frank pushes Joe to the ground, and they both turn in the dry grass. ‘Give ’im one, Frank,’ Grace calls out.
‘Shut up,’ Lizzie says. Her body fizzes.
Joe scrambles up from underneath.
‘It’s just a bit of fun.’ Grace puts her hand out, misses connecting with Lizzie.
Frank brings his fist up into Joe’s face with a funny popping noise. Joe sinks down, and Lizzie feels sick. Recalls the track, the horse falling and the voice of the woman next to her, ‘a sorry sight’. Why doesn’t Joe move? She urges him up off the ground. Not like the dumb horse, with no fight left in him. She brings a light over to Joe. The white of his face, eyes barely open. She shakes his arm. ‘Get up.’
‘He’ll be right, Liz. Leave him alone.’ Grace makes to pull her away.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Frank says. ‘Didn’t mean it. Wasn’t even that hard.’
Joe rights himself. He grunts and slips out of the light. The dark form of his body bunched up in the gloom. Frank, turned towards Grace, swings back round. Joe’s fist connects with his jaw. Lizzie sees Frank’s open mouth as his head jerks sideways then springs back into place. Joe snorts, a film of spit on his teeth. Frank takes an unsteady step, crossing his legs and tripping himself. He sits down hard, his knees up.
‘Christ, you have to do that?’ Grace asks Joe, dropping next to Frank.
Joe breathes hard. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.
‘Didn’t see that coming,’ Frank mutters.
Lizzie senses Joe’s body next to her, the heat coming off him and the stillness of his hands by his sides. She’s glad the two of them are the ones standing. Like she’s in partnership with him. She helped him rally after Frank’s hit took him down.
‘I’ll get you a drink,’ Joe says to Frank. ‘You hit me too hard in the first place.’
While he’s gone, Lizzie tells Grace, ‘Don’t spoil this, raising a stink. Joe’s the most decent bloke I’ve met.’
‘Jesus,’ says Grace.
‘You’re so hard on me. I’m not beautiful like you.’
‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I’m the one whose man got the dirty left.’
Joe comes back with more booze, and Grace gets Frank sitting up and gives him the bottle. He takes a sip and spits it out. There’s blood in it. He lies back down, clutching the bottle.
Joe walks away from them and plonks on the bottom step, Lizzie following.
‘Don’t feel too good meself,’ he says.
‘You crook?’ With a flutter of fear, she moves closer to him, trying to make out his expression. Lines fan from the corners of his eyes. He puts an arm around her and pulls her against him. Off balance, she leans into him too heavily. His hand on her thigh, then her waist.
‘Sit next to me a minute,’ he says. She fits her head into his shoulder and waits for her heart to stop beating so hard. The sky slides over her. The smell of rum on his breath. When he speaks again, his voice hums in his chest. ‘Don’t leave.’
She’s not used to people wanting her around. She tries to shut down the effect of his words, but something has already clicked over and reached out to him. The length of her thigh is along his, the movement of his heart against her cheek. She closes her eyes.
When she opens them, Grace is standing above her, and the fire is dying. Lizzie sits up. ‘I’m taking Frank home,’ Grace says, and nods to Joe. ‘He didn’t hold back on him. Loosed a tooth.’
‘They were just playing,’ Lizzie says.
Grace leads Frank to the stairs. He misses the first step, falls forward with his hand out, pushes himself upright. His swollen-up face is visible in the light of the house, the blood on his bottom lip. Then Lizzie focuses on the warmth of Joe’s hand in her own – strange he can do that to someone but then hold her so gently.
A man pushes past Frank and Grace as they move inside the house. He comes down the stairs and throws more wood into the barrel. He looks around, grabs hold of the neighbour’s sloping fence, its pickets tilted like loose teeth, then he pushes in the already snapped crossbar and holds it aloft. He javelins the paling into the barrel, where it smoulders, paint bubbling. The smell of lead.
Joe says, ‘Want to go back up?’ He lifts himself gingerly. Lizzie doesn’t know if she should touch him as they climb the stairs. Inside, he squints in the light of the hallway and eyes the fringed lampshade as though it’s a jellyfish up there, dangling from the ceiling.
Lizzie catches sight of limbs tangled on the lounge-room couch, a woman’s stockinged foot with the shoe sliding off. They can’t go in there. She finds them chairs in the darkened hallway, regrets moving now that her body is cooling away from Joe’s.
‘Didn’t mean to lose me block,’ he says. ‘Hope I didn’t cause trouble.’
She thinks of Grace’s anger. ‘It’s alright,’ she says anyway.
‘I get … sometimes when I’m hurting.’ He raises his hands, open-palmed. ‘The war did a number on me.’ He puts a hand to his forehead.
‘Can’t be as screwy as my old man.’
Joe laughs, and she feels clever. ‘I needed that. Stop taking meself so seriously. You get me out of me own head.’ He cages her hand against her knee. She leans close to him, and his breath moves her hair. She holds herself away from him just barely. Wants to let herself go but doesn’t think it would be right just yet. Something her mother would do. She has to be certain about him, that he’ll hang arou
nd. She wonders what happened to him on the battlefield, what kind of pain he suffered that made him so ready to lash out. Grasping for something in the dark, some sense of it, she has no reference points. Her father was too old to fight.
She’s drifting towards sleep, the booze deadening her, when Joe starts as if he’s just waking up. ‘Let’s get you into bed,’ he says.
Groggy and heavy-limbed, she leads him into her room. The ceiling shifts, straightens, moves again. Her stomach trembles. She collapses on her bed, lets the blanket cushion her. Voices outside – the tangled couple in the lounge room must have shut the door, because someone’s rattling the handle and knocking, saying, ‘Open up, open up!’
‘Bugger off,’ the man calls, and something heavy hits the wall.
Lizzie presses into the wooden slats of the bedhead. Joe stands over her, close enough that he could touch her. People are calling goodbye to her dad, loud in the street outside her window, the sound dipping in and out as they wind their way down the hill. She cocoons herself, pulling the blanket over her head to block out the men singing downstairs, a high falsetto joining them, cracking, rising again. She tightens the blanket, imagines that it’s this man standing above her. It both excites and scares her to think of Joe’s arms around her in bed. She holds on to the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Stay.’
He pauses, but then he says, ‘Don’t want to get you in trouble with your dad.’
She lets him go. Part of her is hurt. She doesn’t want to look desperate, but he should stand up to her dad. ‘We’re not doing anything wrong.’
‘I will if I stay.’
A surge inside her. She doesn’t know what to tell him. He’s already turning away. She wants to move towards him, but he’s closed the door. The emptiness of the room, and the buzz of her own body.
A few days later, Joe takes her to the Osbourne Hotel, its arched doorways outlined in strips of white, matching bands framing the windows and balustrades of the top-storey verandah. Joe leads her into the entrance facing Ann Street, his hand on her back. As they walk through the main bar, a man with a billiards cue eyes her off. She stares back.
‘Know him?’ Joe asks, and Lizzie shakes her head. She’s worked out she can play safely with men from these distances, shoot quick glances and look down again. This way, it’s easy enough to get rid of them – she can just turn aside for too long or disappear for a while. She enjoys the thrill of these moments, the connection of their eyes, the vibration of her body in response.
‘You shouldn’t stare at strange men. Didn’t your daddy tell you that?’
‘If he did, I forgot.’ Her dad long ago stopped telling her what to do.
Joe increases the pressure of his hand on her waist. He steers her to the ladies’ lounge out back and then to a table against the wall below a window. He gestures for her to sit in the chair locked in by another table. She sits there because she wants to be trapped by him. He seals off her exit with his body, laying his arm flat against the chair. A flight of darkened stairs rises above her head, leading to the hotel’s guestrooms.
The waiter serves fat slabs of roast lamb, pooled with gravy and its own pink juices, a side of watery carrots and cabbage boiled of all colour. Joe forks a chunk, folds it into the middle of his mouth, has to have another go at getting his lips around it. He sieves beer through his teeth and the meat, chews, swallows. He pushes the vegetables so they rim the plate, leans back in his chair with his beer in his hand.
She asks him again about why he came north. He says something vague and looks away. Her knife goes through her meat softly; she’s used to stringy silverside. When she turns to face Joe, he’s close as though he has something else to say, but his lips are shut. She traces their outline with her eyes, slips down to the collar of his shirt, the top button undone. A tangle of dark hair. His hand on her wrist.
Something taps the window next to her head. ‘Lizzie!’
She spins around. Grace is leaning on the windowsill, a group of young men glued right behind her. Lizzie recognises Johnno and Hanrahan, and she turns from them. These boys crumbled the last of what she had with her mum. She hopes they’re watching her and Joe, who’s taking her out properly and buying her dinner. He nods warily at Grace and looks back at Lizzie.
‘Shout us a drink?’ Grace says to the side of his face. ‘You owe me one after what you did to my fella.’
Joe looks at her full on. ‘You, because you’re Lizzie’s mate,’ he says. ‘Not these larrikins.’ Lizzie doesn’t think he’s said her name before. She’s glad he doesn’t want anything to do with the boys.
Grace nods at Joe, grins at Lizzie and eyes the window as though she’s going to climb it, but Joe gestures her around with his forefinger. She disappears and then reappears at the entrance, heads over to their table.
‘What’s your poison?’ Joe asks her.
She eyes the downed pints in front of Lizzie and Joe. ‘Same as yours.’
Joe returns with his hands circling three beers. Grace sticks her tongue in the foam, and Lizzie does it too. She catches Joe staring, dips her tongue in the beer, wets it and runs it over her lips. Joe watches her, his head pressed against the wall and his face very still.
‘I interrupting something?’ Grace asks. She looks at Lizzie over the rim of her glass and raises her eyebrows.
‘This’ll be the last round before closing,’ Joe says. The Osbourne is a respectable hotel that keeps the six p.m. closing time, so he must have been trying to impress Lizzie when he chose it.
‘Frank’s recovered, thanks for asking,’ Grace says to Joe, looking him straight on.
Joe says calmly, ‘Shouldn’t have struck out like that in a friendly match. Needs to learn to control himself.’
Grace shoots a glance at Lizzie, who shrugs, staying right out of it. Frank was only passing through anyway. Lizzie doesn’t know how Grace can stand it, the way men just disappear from her life. Already Lizzie has a flutter of panic at the thought that Joe might up and leave her.
One of the young men outside warbles, a willy-wagtail’s cry, and tilts his head at Grace. ‘I’m off,’ she says. ‘They’ve spotted a nice one for me.’ She does this sometimes for a bit extra – flirts with men in bars and, while they’re distracted, the boys pinch their coin. She downs the beer, stands up, wobbles and burps. Lizzie laughs. ‘Thanks for the drink, Dad,’ Grace says and sits on Joe’s knee to kiss him on the cheek. ‘I’ll leave you to her.’ Grace trips outside.
Joe eyes off the empty glass. ‘She can put it away,’ he says.
‘I know. Grace and me’ve had some good nights together. One bar down there,’ Lizzie points off along the street, ‘plays jazz on a Saturday, and by morning the floors are swimming in booze.’
‘You go there with Grace?’ he asks, and Lizzie nods. ‘And those boys?’
‘Not them. Grace’s friends. Don’t like ’em much.’ Lizzie isn’t ready to tell him about what they asked her to do – what Grace does – with the men they find for her, out the back of hotels. She doesn’t know the language for what’s happened to her since her dad stopped caring where she went. She only plays around in the light, where the exits are visible. She’s learnt to keep her expression still, to give the impression she’s seen it all before and to keep her distance. On those nights with Grace, she longs to be touched, but backs away before anything much happens. Now she wants it.
As if he knows, Joe puts his arm around her shoulders, breathes into her neck. ‘Come to the jazz club with me.’
‘Alright.’
While she’s standing on the edge of the pavement next to Joe, waiting for an omnibus to pass, the lights burn into Lizzie’s memory as though she’s lifting up and outside her own body. The feeling drops away, but she’ll remember that moment, even if she forgets the rest of the night. Not that she wants to forget any of it.
The jazz club is dark. Joe complains about how much the drinks cost. She feels bad for suggesting the place and doesn’t know what to say. Wishes he wouldn’t spoil
it. They sit in the dark while a man on stage licks the reed of his sax and slides through the notes, which fall down over them, the piano underneath stamping out a heartbeat. Across the bottom of the stage runs a painted banner showing frogs crouched on toadstools – they’re playing the double bass, drums, an instrument Lizzie doesn’t recognise. All badly painted, the frogs too fat, too human, their faces lumpy, eyes bulged and webbed feet raised as though waving. On the band’s music stands hang fringed banners, stitched with their names in elaborate cursive: Willy, Ted, Bunny, Roy, Lynn. Behind them, a cloth peony vine weaves through wooden lattice to look like a Chinese garden; banners hang from either side, printed with Chinese lettering.
Joe’s hand is in hers. The music slips away. Just him. The skin at his wrist, his forearm, feels different to the skin of younger men she’s known. It sags, lacks elasticity. He acts as if he’s holding something in, which she could touch if he’d let her. He moves his fingers over the pleats of her skirt, and she shivers, grins at him, but his face is turned to the stage. Maybe she’s broken the rules. She looks back at the man folding over the sax and pretends nothing’s going on.
Joe’s fingers slide up and down her leg. It tickles. She wants to pull away. She hopes his movement changes, and that she doesn’t laugh. When he leaves her to get a drink, she can still feel his hand. She’s really got it bad – one of her mum’s phrases. No choice but to let this disease run its course. But that implies it’s something to be got over, and she’s its victim. She doesn’t feel like that, so maybe her mum was wrong. Maybe that’s just what went on between her parents.
Joe returns. They sit awkwardly, Lizzie trying to think of a way she can go back to touching him. She leans closer so she can hear what he says. In the dark, his breath hits her ear with the music, sax notes falling from his mouth, some alien language, and she panics because shouldn’t she understand?
He cups the back of her head and kisses her. She shuts her eyes. The movement of his lips on hers. Stout on his breath. When he puts his tongue in her mouth, she shivers and reaches hesitantly out with her own, feels it connect with his, two live muscles sliding together. Something drops away from her. She sinks into him, putting her hands on his arms and rubbing against his skin. When she opens her eyes, she meets his gaze unexpectedly – he’s watching her kiss him. What does he make of her expressions, her clumsiness?
Treading Air Page 3